First, a bit on how these sites work: sign on to Omegle, click "text" and a message pops up that says, "You are now chatting with a random stranger. " Chatting starts out relatively innocuous, though in the five times I tried, most "strangers" wanted to know if I was male or female, or told me if they were (they were all male).

You, or your partner, can always disconnect at will.

Maybe Jack would laugh at my feeble attempt to look sexy and show all his friends. Even though I had nothing to drink, I felt just as buzzed as my beer-imbibing colleagues.

My diversion was already becoming an obsession when, as the fall of 2012 began, Jack asked me if we could have videochat sex. Bathed in the light of laptop screens, we touched ourselves and talked dirty, enacting our version of an online porno.

I mean, that's like a virtual hickey," began *Stephanie, the most logical of my college friends. Jack moved away less than a week later, and as he stood by the moving van, he said words I'll never forget: "You mean a lot to me. But then, a voice inside me said: "You broke his heart. That will make him feel better." I donned my sexiest lingerie (read: my most expensive Frederick's of Hollywood purchase) and lounged seductively in front of my mirror. Immediately, my body shivered with a thrill entirely new. I dragged my fingernails upwards on my thigh, biting my lip, while reading Jack's response. When out with friends, I made flimsy excuses so I could leave and get my fix.

Soon, many women would feel perfectly comfortable sending sexually charged i Phone pics to their partners... Who could have predicted, in those innocent college years, an era where the whole world would bear witness to naughty selfies of Kim Kardashian's famous backside, or of A-list celebrity pictures being leaked to the masses? I came -- I kid you not -- 18 times, as if making up for my lack of intimacy with the other man. Briefly, I recalled Stephanie's words about virtual hickeys. As if smoking sativa leaves, my happiness bordered on delirium. Again, I admired my body, feared it would be mocked, then reveled in Jack's incessant flattering. At my parents' house, I ran to the bathroom to snap a quick boob shot in the mirror.

"Talk to strangers:" That's the tag line for Omegle, a website where girls can text chatwith random people they've never met.

Omegle and Chatroulette, which allows users to videochatwithstrangers, have become explosively popular with teen girls, and I've asked some girls I respect to weigh in on the new chat craze.

For most people these forays into cybersex are relatively harmless recreational pursuits, but experts in the field say that the affordability, accessibility and anonymity of the Internet are fueling a brand new psychological disorder -- cybersex addiction -- that appears to be spreading with astonishing rapidity and bringing turmoil to the lives of those affected. Occasionally, they progress to off-line affairs with sex partners they meet online. Al Cooper of Stanford, who has conducted the largest and most detailed survey of online sex, calls the Net "the crack cocaine of sexual compulsivity." The survey, conducted online among 9,265 men and women who admitted surfing the Net for sexually oriented sites, indicated that at least 1 percent were already seriously hooked on online sex.

"People who are vulnerable can get hooked before they know it." To those who say a behavioral compulsion is not a true addiction, Dr.

Schneider responded with a definition of addiction that would clearly apply to cybersex abusers: "Loss of control, continuation of the behavior despite significant adverse consequences and preoccupation or obsession with obtaining the drug or pursuing the behavior." Although behavioral addictions involve no external drugs, preliminary research has suggested that they cause changes in brain chemicals, like the release of endorphins, that help to perpetuate the behavior.

Chatroulette works pretty much the same way, except instead of a text that pops up, it's a video.

You allow the website to turn on your computer's camera, and you're off.

And it all began with me being a heartless succubus. He looked like something out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, with lustrous blonde hair I still find myself remembering fondly.